Everything is Awesome!

It was a wild and crazy weekend.

It began with everyone applying a thick coat of bug spray so the kids could ride bikes around the cul-de-sac - only to the tree on that side and not past the silver car on the other... Darby stepped up their game this time, and declared a race. She insisted on having a flag drop to start the race.  We didn't have a checkered one, but she was satisfied with the "America one". The big one. As you can tell by the photo, little girl is not to be messed with. Side note, I do not like one bit how grown up he looks in this first picture...


Next we moved on to viewings of Lip Sync Battle followed by The Lego Movie.  Because of which episode of LSB it was, that turned into a full immersion into the song "Everything is Awesome!". That has emerged as a current favorite song - topped only by Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" (our dance party song), "The Quack Quack Song" (aka "Six Little Ducks"), and "Lollipop" by the Chordettes (circa 1950-something). Dalton does like to customize "Everything is Awesome!" though. I prefer the Kiss version over the Doodie Butt one, but Stella seems to disagree. To each their own I guess.

Saturday morning began ridiculously early as usual. I attempted to claim a few more minutes of sleep between fetching endless bowls of cereal and waffles (I believe they sampled every single kind of cereal in the cupboard) before they finally finished the job by jumping on my head and pronouncing it "Coronation Day!" Now there does not appear to be an consistency concerning what Coronation Day involves, other than there is a always a lot of running and the repeated shouting of "It's Coronation Day! It's Coronation Day!" (for those who are not in the know, this comes from the movie Frozen). Often we have to pack a lot of bags - usually of toys and often plastic food. Sometimes we all have to pile into the imaginary car to drive to the Coronation - although we have never actually gotten there and there has never actually been any kind of coronation ceremony. Saturday the Coronation Day festivities involved us having to make a cake - a real one. Since I was clearly not getting any more sleep, I said - what the hell, let's make a cake. The only mix I had was an old Pink Lemonade flavored one, but pink cake seemed appropriate for Coronation Day anyway.


As the cake was baking, they moved on to new adventures - namely playing hide and seek inside the clothes hamper. Dalton spent a decent chunk of the weekend in there. He took it from hide and seek to his being a Monster in the Box. Sunday they proclaimed themselves a Talking Trash Can.


After a nap taken under duress, we finished up the cake. It's a long, complicated story, but the finished cake was pretty impressive. It had 3 layers - 2 chocolate and 1 pink lemonade. There was blue and yellow icing on the inside and pink lemonade icing on the outside. And butterfly sprinkles.  It was worthy of a Coronation Day cake for sure.

Luckily we had people to share our cake with. Ms. Jamie brought Jordan & Bailey over, and Ms. Elizabeth brought Eva. There was more bike racing to be had, with an increased field of racers and Darby playing the role of Flag Girl.

Dalton remains terrified that the garbage truck is going to steal the bikes and scooters. He wanted to go in at one point but got hysterical when I refused to bring the bikes in, since others were still using them. Despite a complete lack of garbage truck sightings, my promises to protect them fell on deaf ears, and eventually we all just decided to throw in the towel and go in. He was in a frenzied panic until they were all safely inside.

The night ended in a sleepover for Ms. Jamie, Jordan and Bailey. Darby has been wanting one for weeks now and it went shockingly well.  Jordan & Darby slept in Darby's bed, and Dalton & Bailey slept in Dalton's bed and everyone slept through the night in the beds where they started.  The last time they slept over it was like a big game of nocturnal musical chairs.